There's a couple of names that, for two or three years now, have kept turning up in the production credits for some of the freshest, most innovative speech-based programmes on the radio. If Sheila O'Callaghan and Richard Beirne have tended to make shows for the more peripheral, out-of-the-way slots in the schedule, the realm of the arty documentary or the personal memoir, then all we can do is thank God and Helen Shaw that such slots still exist in the RTE Radio 1 timetable.
This month one of those slots carries the alluring, if slightly ponderous, title, Through the Listening Glass (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday). Since Beirne and O'Callaghan share the programme's authorship (and since alluring-if-slightly-ponderous is basically the look to which this column aspires), we marked it down as 15 minutes not to be missed.
The only disappointment about this week's offering, Graffiti, is that it only lasted that quarter-hour. It was a wee beauty of a piece about graffiti artists ("writers") in Dublin, built around a nocturnal visit to a railway yard - where we listened to an artist at work, decorating a bit of a freight train. Who would have thought a can of spray paint could make such evocative noises?
The programme didn't overplay the frisson of danger in its making, though you couldn't help listening extra close for the footsteps of any approaching night-watchman. And it didn't, or couldn't, explore or assess the visual aesthetics of these ubiquitous works of art. It did take the testimony of the creators at face value - "I'm an artist," said one, "an artist, full stop, point blank". (Point blank?) Happily in terms of radio, while the making of a "tag" or a "piece" does tend to require a certain peace and quiet, a very definite musical soundtrack lurked in the background. This music is, of course, hip-hop. The "writers", like rappers and break-dancers, self-consciously model themselves on African-American "crews"; they aspire to nothing higher than applying their craft to the side of a New York subway car. Such blatant imitation is easily mocked, but it's worth recalling - as these artists do - that this culture took hold among young men in working-class Dublin in the 1980s, when it had hardly a shred of help from television, the music press or licensed radio. (Morever, in 1999 hip-hop is a global language. A recent report from Macedonia told us that Kosovar Albanian youths in the refugee camps traded their cassettes full of raps complaining about life before the war. I haven't heard about the style of their graffiti.) Anyway, Through the Listening Glass stayed trackside in Dublin, and it very definitely hiphopped - revealing a little something about a hidden subculture in the bargain.
Don't expect to hear graffiti artists or Chuck D interviewed on Deirdre Purcell (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). The summer substitute for Marian Finucane seems to have calculated that its core audience has rather different cultural concerns, and it has catered for them ruthlessly.
Starting off a couple of weeks back with a fairly reverent documentary on Lourdes that could have done with the Beirne-O'Callaghan touch, the programme has had what you might call a generational skew that would make Gaybo blush. Perhaps I've just been lucky, but every time I tune in it's Foster and Allen, or Frank Patterson, or memories 50 years on of the Seapoint in Salthill, Galway. Even an interview with kids who had just sat the Leaving Cert came out a bit like a chat with the granny.
It's perfectly nice, and Purcell is, if anything, smoother and more confident than ever (than Marian, even). She's hasn't quite enough sense, however, of when a line of questioning is dying; combine that with the sort of material she has covered, and I haven't quite enough patience to keep listening.
I've kept listening, however, to Play of the Week's "Rough Magic Season" (RTE Radio 1, Tuesday). A few weeks back, the admiration was for Pom Boyd's all-too-realistic domestic drama, Down onto Blue; this week, the season closed with a more experimental offering, Donal O'Kelly's The Dogs - also a play about family conflict around a Dublin table, but one that expands, explodes, into wild parody of the genre, sur-reality and sweeping political allegory to boot.
As we suffered yet another countdown to the resolution or otherwise of the North's political impasse, The Dogs - though it's a few years old - was a passionate, sometimes hilarious, occasionally devastating review of the argument that has raged in the Irish nationalist "family". O'Kelly's ultimate optimism emerges as a joke: everyone around the table simultaneously says "I guess I owe you all an apology"; the Christmas turkey rises from the table as a swan and is joined airborne by the family pooches, Pax and Rebel, as the soundtrack tinkles the tune of The Ugly Duck- ling from Hans Christian Andersen. Director Daniel Reardon both conveys and manages the chaos so we're left longing for the tale to be true.
In the same context, maybe it's understandable the Bastille Day celebrations on the wireless were subdued; in spite of the events in Tehran, I heard no one ready to celebrate the mob's heroism. Lyric FM's offering on Wednesday evening went for an entirely different version of our cultural inheritance from France, one that's more, well, lyrical than revolutionary. In a chummy piece of diplomacy, the French cultural attache here, Andre Renoir, read the most achingly romantic poetry - "Reviens, reviens," he begged his lover, enumerating, lamenting, each valley and hamlet that lay between them. Ethna Tinney read the "Come back . . ." translation with equal passion, and the musical settings from Berlioz and Ravel left us needing only bread and wine for a perfectly Parisian act of transubstantiation.